Catch Me (If You Can)
by TheOneWithTheObsessions
Summary: They are thieves in the night, stealing glances and whispering secrets into never-ending hallways, only to flee at the echoing sound of footsteps. They both love her so much: her boys. She wants them both. AU.


**A/N: I've been working on this for a looooong time. Most of it was inspired by Fall Out Boy lyrics, and I've been limping along trying to finish it for a few months. This story wouldn't be half of what it is without the help of Muslim_Barbie, so big hugs to her. I don't own Doctor Who or Fall Out Boy. Please Review!**

**...**

_Does your husband know the way that the sunshine gleams from your wedding band? _

_Does he know the way to worship our love? _

_I don't want to be just a footnote in someone else's happiness – Headfirst Slide into Cooperstown on a Bad Bet_

...

**_Don't get caught._**

They are thieves in the night, stealing glances and whispering secrets into never-ending hallways, only to flee at the echoing sound of footsteps.

He gives them strange looks when they're together: a puzzled frown, a wrinkled brow. He can't see what it is in the air between them, but he keeps trying.

She wishes he'd stop. She doesn't want him to know. He _can't _know.

Her constant fear that he'll figure it out lingers like a bad smell. The fear that they'll be caught pressed against one another in an alcove, with no patrolling guards or rampant alien beasts as a convenient excuse. She's afraid he'll notice that his touch lingers too long, that she smiles just a little too brightly when he grabs her hand.

Sometimes words are too complex for what they are. She thinks that if it could be described in pictures, it would be in a series of snapshots; momentary glimpses - out of context and removed from time.

_A hand, reaching out to grasp another amongst the rumpled bed sheets. The glint of a ring by lamplight. Lips and teeth teasing the skin of a neck. A leg wrapped around a bare waist in the dark._

Perhaps words _are _better than pictures.

Some nights, she wishes he'd just leave her. Just tell her that he's finally had enough of her galloping around after a madman, and that he wants to go _home_. (_Home to what?__ Home to work and bills and responsibility? Home to a house that's empty of everything she's wanted since she was 7 years old and stayed up all night in her garden?)._ He'll expect her to agree and come with him, but she'll give him that look – the one with the eyebrow, the one that doesn't need words – and he'll just look bewildered and shuffle his feet. He'll leave quietly. He won't say goodbye.

Some nights, she wishes she could stop. Stop creeping out of her husband's bed while he's asleep to visit another man. Stop making excuses to be alone with him. She tries once or twice, but after a day she comes tiptoeing back, knocking on his door in the middle of the night like an addict looking for a quick fix. When he opens the door and sees her, pupils dilated and clothes a rumpled mess, he pulls her into him and holds her close.

On those nights he whispers words into her hair, words of comfort and gratitude and want. He teases her ear with his breath. His warm hands against her back, fingers tracing absent circles into her shoulder blades. She shivers against him and runs her hands through his hair. Tugs his lips to hers in a kiss that feels like a fight.

(It's a fight neither win and the cycle continues).

She's happier when she's with him. Really, she is. But it's an incomplete happiness, and she's always reaching for more, always wanting to scream love from the rooftops of distant cities.

But she's always afraid someone will hear.

_The atmosphere between them is charged. Their skin is shock-y. Static bursts make hairs stand on end. The brush of fingertips brings lightening pinpricks to the surface, each caress a flash of sensation sliding across skin. Tactile, warm and comfortable sensations build higher with every soft touch. Muscles loose and heavy, almost drugged, clumsy motions. Delicate hands reduced to fumbling in the dark. An undercurrent of electricity running through their veins. Tensing in rhythm, perhaps to the beat of their hearts, nearly matching. Not quite… almost… yes! Backs arched, fists form in bed sheets, nails leaving behind red raised marks. Breathe in. Breathe out. Relax. Collapse on top of each other. Sweat beginning to form into drips on hair. More touching. Gently running hands across smooth skin that covers the hard muscles. Breathe in. Breathe out. Relax. _

He tries so hard. Ernest fumbling fingers and lips find an awkward rhythm, either too rough or too gentle. Tracing her skin reverently, tickling touch alighting on all the wrong places, sighs of exasperation confused for pleasure. She wishes he'd stop. _Don't let him stop. He'll know, he'll know! _Faking her way through yet again and leaving as soon as he's snoring.

This can't go on.

They both love her so much: her boys. She wants them both, like a child wanting more ice cream. Craving both flavours – chocolate and vanilla. Just a taste of each, never too much or it'll become sickly sweet and too rich.

She always was a spoiled child.

But it's leeching the colour from her, keeping this secret. The weight of it pulling her down, down, down. (She always thought that was a metaphor, _the weight of secrets._ Maybe it's supposed to be, but then nothing is as it should be around him, and she walks hunched with a heavy heart every single day.) Her every footstep begins to echo, with _tell him, tell him, just bloody tell him you idiot,_ reverberating back to her in everything from a whisper to a scream.

_When she breaks and confesses it all in an out-of-the-way corner of the TARDIS, he doesn't shout. He just looks sort of small and pathetic. He doesn't cry – he doesn't say anything at all. He just stands there, looking blankly at her sobbing face. Then he leaves. He turns around and walks away for the first time in her life. She collapses in her out-of-the-way hidey-hole, and cries until he comes and gets her. She clings to his jacket, buries her face in his neck and wails _he's gone, he's actually gone, isn't he? What have we done? Oh god what have we done_ over and over until she has no tears left to cry. Later, when she wakes from the sleep she doesn't remember having, she half expects him to have returned. _

_He hasn't. _

_He tells her that he dropped him off home, and didn't say goodbye._

Life moves on for her, eventually. She doesn't feel lighter for a long time, but this time it isn't the weight of the secret she carries but the weight of the guilt. After several weeks of moping, she finds a spark of happiness hiding amongst all the sadness. She finds it in the corners of his eye when he smiles at her, in the light of the TARDIS console, in the far flung corners of the universe unseen by human eyes. She finds it in the bubble of laughter he releases when the TARDIS does something unexpected and brilliant. She finds it, quite simply, in him. Gently, gently she nurtures that spark until it burns brighter than the black misery and is all she can see when she closes her eyes.

She still can't go home. But that's okay.

She has a new home now; with her boy and his box. You might see them from time to time, striding across the skin of a new world, always hand in hand and occasionally running for their lives.

**_Try and catch them. _**

_..._

_Say my name and his in the same breath_

_I dare you to say they taste the same._

_The best of us can find happiness in misery. – I Don't Care_


End file.
